Brown University - Liber Brunensis Yearbook (Providence, RI)

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24 THE FOUR YEAR TRIP: ONE PERSONS EXPERIENCE . . . Freshman year was the West Quad. A new sort of family called 'the hall'. Long nights of frantic con- versation in smoky rooms where we learned that this was where and how we would learn . . . First friends were those most immediate, a dozen of us stuck in a dimlit corner of the maze, below ground near the heaters and the humm. We sat in that hall the first night listening to our intrepid counselor, some sophomore I mistook for a senior who had taken the job because it was his only shot at a single, reading his opening remarks. When he finished each of us in turn correctly pronounced our name and described in as few words as possible where we were from. Our counselor then retired to the dim recesses of his quilts with his short plain girlfriend, never to be seen again, and we headed for bars or bed, beginning a week during which we took in more than we ever suspected. Suddenly we were Brown stu- dents. Whaa? Freshman year 1 sampled departments, taking several courses 'outside' my concentration. Economics, for which 1 thought I had a sort of natural, inherited flair and had whizzed through in high school, dissolved into a convoluted spiral of equations and graphs which left me totally confused and passing the course by a single point. Take a deep breath and congratulate yourself for coming to a school that offers SNC. My Introduction to Political Science was reassuring because it was just like high school but due to class size felt like college. Unfortunately the followup courses never seemed to get beyond this level. There were other courses, philosophy, engineering, sociology, all of which only reinforced my suspicion that time in English and writing courses was time best spent. Sophomore year was, in a sense, Freshman year relived in reverse: we had arrived as individuals and spent our first year clustering this second year, more confident and independent, we devoted to scattering. Large groups broke down into several smaller groups, close friends getting close while casual acquaintances disappeared. I was soon spending nearly all my time with only a few good friends and was perfectly satisfied with that situation. We had gained a fashionable cynicism toward and about college life in general, and now set about displaying our attitude. We proudly considered ourselves a tight minority of recluses, sharing our dis- like for the typical Brown student and avoiding activities like the clap. We invariably found fault with classes, professors, departments, dormitories, student organiza- tions, student publications, and students. By mid-year we had dropped out of the Ratty contingent, repulsed by it's exaggerated illustration of the very sense of com- munity which had, to a large extent, saved us only a year before. Drugs, of course, were very much a part of the situation, reinforcing our belief that we were different, not just more members of the herd, that we knew a little something they would never knew.' This Seems, in retrospect, and particularly because of the way I've described it, like a very negative and non- productive attitude. In a sense I suppose it was, except that the outsider' pose we chose to take allowed us a certain displaced observer's perspective toward our environment, leading us to the important realization that Brown is a school, not a world. And, perhaps most importantly, we soon discovered that our reclusive tendencies could lead us in highly positive, productive directions. For myself this direction was primarily toward writing. I also discovered, quite surprisingly for the first time, that I could be perfectly contented with just my own company and that the curious mood I was reluctant to label as solitude held both mystery and magic. By the end of the year I found myself no longer the gregarious high school kid nor even a member of a particular clique, but rather coming to understand that time alone might be time most productive. Junior year was 'time off', time to take a good look around and experiment with vague notions of self- education. I spent the fall of that year at home, writing with literary presses rather than college professors in mind, and learned a few things Brown could never teach me. Rejection slips, rejection slips, something Brown doesn't offer. I had planned to travel in the spring, but for a number of reasons which still arent clear to me and because money was scarce I returned to Brown instead. Rather than abandoning my independent projects I compromised: part time. This 'short work status gave me the best of both worlds: all Brown's resources were available to me and I now had time to investigate rather than simply move around amongst them. When one's time is taken up almost entirely with assignments and re- quirements whatever is left open is almost automatically devoted to partying, skipping right over the pos- sibility of constructive Mindless Pleasures. With a full course load and extensive required reading and papers to write, itis all but impossible to enjoy a relaxing afternoon rooting around in the buried wonders of the John Hay Library or wandering through the R.I.S.D. museum. Nevertheless, by the end of that semester I was excited about returning to Brown full time, whereas many of my classmates were complaining about being too long in one place and thus wanting nothing from their senior year so much as to finish and get out Horrible attitude. And so 1 prepared for a summer of travel knowing I would return in September as Ffull- fledged Ivy Leaguer once again, having learned in the interim that time spent doing was better than time spent thinking about doing. And now I wander the campus, a semi-senior, and catch myself occasionally thinking as I look about that in four years we haven't really changed. But we have. We all live off-campus now, spread about in knots of three or five, and see each other mostly in the Blue Room I never set foot in there freshman year or the GCB I didn't know it existed freshman year or on visits to apartments which are somehow always more formal than desired. An element of community inescapable in the dorms is sacrificed to comfort and a certain amount of independence. And in that any gathering of more than four or five people must now be prearranged, we have lost an element of spontaneity as well. But more important than these revisions in our social patterns is the fact that our daily lives have changed from days of discovery to days of using what has been discovered. The wide-eyed curiousity with which we originally approached Brown's numerous and varied